Personal Branding

Personal branding and marketing yourself

The topic of marketing yourself is pretty tightly intertwined with personal branding. If you’re like me, you’ve never really thought about the difference until right now.

Analogy

Think of yourself as a plain, unmarked can of soda. You’ve got awesome fizz inside. Branding would slap a distinctive logo and colors on the can. Then, marketing would be responsible for elevating you, the freshly minted can of Coca-Cola, to the top of people’s minds.

Branding is the stuff that uniquely identifies you. Marketing puts your awesomeness in front of people.

Strongest branding creates its own market

Of course, having strong branding helps marketing. This is why they are correlated. In fact, the strongest branding creates its own market. You don’t want a laptop; you want a Macbook. You don’t want an electric vehicle; you want a Tesla. You don’t want sneakers; you want Air Jordans. You can probably come up with more examples.

It’s really easy to sell to a market in which you are the only seller—shooting fish in a barrel you made. Nobody can compete with you at being you.

Create stuff that uniquely identifies you

The other wonderful feature of personal branding is that it is entirely up to you to create stuff that uniquely identifies you. There’s no store somewhere where you can pick a brand off the shelf and put it on like a new coat. You create it from thin air, with the full dimensionality of all that human diversity has to offer. Seven billion humans on Earth don’t even come close to exhausting the possible space of unique selling points you can pick.

Picking a personal brand

Your personal brand is how people talk about you when you’re not in the room.

So naturally, one way to start picking a brand is to listen to what people have naturally chosen for you.

📝 Caution: You may not like what you hear! That’s okay! That’s what we’re trying to fix.